by Paul Hoffman
“I kept glancing at the clock, watching the seconds tick away,” Pandolfini said. “I had a winning game. In fact, I had four different ways to win. I saw this beautiful combination. Just as I reached out to make it, Evans offered me a draw, which wasn’t fair, because I was thinking.” The rules require that he offer a draw only when it’s his turn to move. “I don’t think he was trying to bend the rules,” Pandolfini said, “but who knows? I think he was just nervous and afraid of losing. Anyway, I declined the offer. But my mind blanked. By accident, I still played one of the four winning moves. But it was the least good of the four.” And Pandolfini didn’t follow it up correctly: he went for a mate that wasn’t there. “I managed by a miracle to pull off a perpetual check”—the continued checking of the king with no mate—Pandolfini said, “and draw the game.”2
Pandolfini tied with five other people for third place. “My prize was fifty dollars,” he said, “and I lost that at the blackjack tables that happened to be in my way as I walked back to my hotel room. ‘Why am I doing this?’ I asked myself. Here I had dropped out of school, driven hundreds of miles, and poured my heart into the game and gotten so little—neither money nor satisfaction.”
Afterward, Pandolfini went to Berkeley to visit a chess-playing buddy from the Marshall and found himself confronted with the same question. “We were playing speed chess at two or three in the morning,” Pandolfini said. “I won the first two games, but I didn’t deserve to. In other words, he was clearly outplaying me, and I won through cheap tricks and gross blunders on his part. He was getting angrier and angrier. In the third game, he was outplaying me again, and once more he let his advantage slip. I began to feel terrible. Then I lost on time. He looked at me and said, ‘Justice triumphs.’ And I thought, Justice triumphs? He wasn’t just making a statement. He really meant it—that he was the Just and I was the Unjust. It became very philosophical for me. I started to question whether I thought the same. Was I there just to beat him? Is that what it’s all about? Blind self-expression? I didn’t want to confront my own aggressive impulses. After that I gave up competitive chess.”
Also in the back of his mind was the suicide in Central Park of an acquaintance whom he had defeated eight times in tournament play. “I read in the paper that he had hanged himself because he had been drafted into the Vietnam War,” Pandolfini told me. “My friends joked that it was because I had beaten him too many times. His death affected me profoundly. Could my life, I wondered, come to nothing in the same way?”3
Pandolfini went back to New York and, with no marketable skills, had a series of odd jobs over the next couple of years. He worked at Gimbels as a salesman but was fired for truancy and violating the dress code. He got a job at the post office on the graveyard shift. “I can understand why they shoot each other,” he said, “boxing mail at three in the morning.”
Pandolfini ended up working at the Strand bookstore. “The Strand was great because I loved books,” he said. “But I certainly missed competitive chess, the thrill of coming up with a strong, unexpected move.” One day after work in 1972, Pandolfini ran into Shelby Lyman, an old friend and fellow master from the Marshall.
“Guess what?” Lyman said. “We’re going to cover the Fischer-Spassky match on PBS—live coverage five hours a day.” An Albany studio of New York’s Channel 13 would produce the show.
A few days later, Pandolfini got a call from Lyman’s producer, Mike Chase, asking if he wanted to appear as a backup chess analyst on the program. Chase couldn’t afford to pay Pandolfini or put him up in a hotel, but he offered to reimburse him for his train fare to and from Manhattan. “I immediately agreed,” Pandolfini said. “I don’t know what came over me. I had to quit the job I liked at the Strand. It was three hours each way to Albany, and I had to make the trip every other day. I didn’t anticipate that the job would turn into anything. I did it because I loved Bobby Fischer.”
At the Marshall a decade earlier, Pandolfini had seen the young Fischer rummage through a moldy index-card file of nineteenth-century games—King’s Gambits and Evans Gambits, swashbuckling, incautious games for the player with the White pieces. “Fischer resurrected these very gambits to win the 1963–1964 United States Championship,” Pandolfini said. “I was a wall boy there, at the Henry Hudson Hotel, moving the pieces on giant demonstration boards so that chess fans in the back of the playing hall could follow the games. Now I wanted to be a part of history and watch him topple the Soviet champion.”
By 1972, Fischer’s playing style had matured. He had put the sketchy nineteenth-century gambits back in the file box. His games were now the work of someone who strove to be in complete control. He won an unprecedented twenty consecutive games against the world’s elite. “While Fischer has always been an extremely aggressive player, all-out for the win,” Timothy Hanke wrote in American Chess Journal,
his style is classical in the sense that he strives for clarity in the position. He will not usually take tactical risks, preferring to play rationally and coldbloodedly; his games are not known for irrational or speculative Tal-like eruptions. It can be illuminating to read Tal’s notes to Fischer’s games, in which Tal mentions various tactical avenues that Fischer might have taken but avoided in the interest of clarity and simplicity.
Outwardly Fischer was a gentleman at the chessboard, but his extraordinary inner drive enervated his opponents. Boris Spassky felt bombarded by a psychic force field at Siegen 1970, in the last game that they played before their world-title bout:
We were in the fifth hour. He was lost, ruined, not a chance! I knew it, he knew it. But he sat there—almost an hour!—calculating, calculating, calculating! Inside, he was screaming. He was pale, like a dead man, but this force was going through him like millions of volts. I could feel it smashing and smashing at me across the board. Well, it had an effect, I can tell you that. Five or ten minutes—all right. But an hour! In the end, I was the one screaming inside. When you play Bobby, it is not a question if you win or lose. It is a question if you survive.
Fischer’s adversaries knew that he derived unwholesome pleasure from ravishing them. “I like to see ’em squirm,” he famously said. When Fischer was alone in a hotel room, psyching himself up for a tournament game, people in the hall would hear him shout comic-book words—Slam! Bam! Zowie!—as he banged pieces down on the board.
The 1972 World Championship was a classic Cold War battle. Fischer, who was twenty-nine, threatened to pull out, because he didn’t like the playing conditions, and Henry Kissinger urged him to stay and fight on behalf of his country. The accompanying television show was a huge success, setting a record for PBS and attracting millions of viewers who did not know how to play chess. Pandolfini’s role in the coverage was minimal—Lyman did most of the talking—but he stood out because he had a shaggy, reddish blond, shoulder-length Afro. “I was a real hippie at a time when that was starting not to be so cool anymore,” Pandolfini said. “I wanted to cut my hair and look good, but the producer wouldn’t let me. He said it was distinctive.”
That summer, chess players became celebrities. “People would pull me over on the sidewalk and ask whether it was better to open with the king pawn or the queen pawn,” Pandolfini said. “Once, I was walking on Sixth Avenue and a stretch limo pulled up. Out jumped a gorgeous woman shouting, ‘Bruce Pandolfini. Bruce Pandolfini! Oh, wow!’ Shelby Lyman and I were in a restaurant in Manhattan, and Dustin Hoffman came up and said, ‘Shelby, how are you?’ ‘Fine,’ Shelby replied. ‘Do I know you?’ Now that I had been on national television, even my father was secretly proud that I had taken up chess.”
In the middle of the Fischer-Spassky match, Lyman told Pandolfini that he no longer had the time to coach some of his private students. “I want you to take over the lessons,” he said.
“But I’m not a chess teacher,” Pandolfini told him.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be great. It’s nothing. Just be yourself,” said Lyman.
Pandolfini gave it a shot. After
a couple lessons he found that he and the student enjoyed it, and he asked Lyman what he should charge. “Fifteen dollars an hour,” said Lyman, “three bucks more than I’m charging.”
“‘How can I charge more than Lyman?’ I asked myself,” said Pandolfini. “Well, the fellow ended up cheerfully paying me fifteen dollars.” One day during the match, Channel 13 told Pandolfini that three hundred people had called requesting chess lessons. He gave fifteen of them lessons and passed the other names to fellow indigent masters. “That’s how many chess teachers in New York got started,” said Pandolfini. The Marshall was also getting calls from people caught up in Fischer mania who just had to know the truth of the Poisoned Pawn Sicilian, and Pandolfini received their names, too.
Besides these private students, Pandolfini took on requests to give group lessons to the blind, the deaf, and the handicapped. “I even taught people who couldn’t leave their homes,” he said. “For a Jewish Community Center on Long Island I developed a program where I taught eight to ten shut-ins at a time over the phone. It was kind of like a talk radio show.”
He also taught a weekly course at the Manhattan House of Detention. “We met in the library,” Pandolfini recalled. “There were mass murderers in the class. One day there was a riot, and the guards sealed the building, trapping me in the library with twelve people, any one of whom could have killed me in a second. I was afraid that someone would say, ‘Let’s take the chess guy hostage.’ I continued the class as if nothing had happened, and they all sat there in rapt attention.” In 1973, he taught the first chess course in the country for college credit—the class my father took—at the New School.
Three months after Pandolfini gave his first private lesson, he was charging as much as $135 an hour. “When people in the chess world found out what I charged,” said Pandolfini, “they couldn’t believe it. ‘Who the hell is he? He can’t play chess anymore, so he teaches.’ Well I didn’t try to justify the rates. I knew I could teach well.” Most chess books were hard to follow because they were written by chess masters who never bothered to teach anyone. Many strong players are poor instructors because they don’t realize how little chess their students know—they talk over their heads. Or else they have such combative personalities that it is not within them to be nurturing and they end up competing with their students.
As more and more children learned the rules of chess, having caught the bug from their Fischer-enthralled older brothers and parents, Pandolfini took them on, dropping his older students. “I felt I could do more with them,” Pandolfini said. “I was starting with tabula rasa, so to speak. I didn’t have to push them hard at first. Their memories were good, and they were learning by leaps and bounds.” In the 1970s, parents were willing to give their kids chess lessons because of the beauty of the game, with no expectation of Pandolfini pushing them to win this or that tournament. “My, has that changed,” Pandolfini said. “You’ve heard of stage mothers? They’re wallflowers compared to chess parents who think their kid is the next Bobby Fischer.”
ONE FRIDAY IN NEW YORK JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS IN 2000, I WATCHED PANDOLFINI give lessons to two of his students. I met him first at the East Village apartment he has had since 1976—“my inner sanctum,” he calls it—a ten-foot-by-ten-foot room with an attached kitchenette and a small bathroom and closet. The kitchen is unusable, the stove and refrigerator blocked by a three-foot-high mound of running shoes, baseball cards, philosophy books, chess manuals, and posters from Searching for Bobby Fischer. The main room is a nest of papers, books, and stacks of video-and audiotapes—lectures on everything from the theory of general relativity to the origins of Romantic poetry—that reach three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. During the day, Pandolfini keeps his mattress in the closet so that there is room to move around. The answers to most questions you could ask about chess history are somewhere in his piles. This time he was rooting through the mess trying to find a 1964 chess magazine with a cover photo of George C. Scott playing chess with Stanley Kubrick on the set of Dr. Strangelove.
“I gave a copy of the photo to Mrs. George C. Scott,” Pandolfini said. “She now wants another copy to give to Tom Cruise. He wants it because he has fond memories of playing chess with Kubrick on the set of Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick was good, but Bogart was probably Hollywood’s best player.” Although Pandolfini couldn’t find the photo, he unearthed a Spanish comic book about love slaves, which Bobby Fischer had translated into English. As we examined Fischer’s childlike writing, Pandolfini realized that he was forty-five minutes late for his first lesson. It is not unusual for him to miss appointments. Once, he failed to show up for a birthday party his friends threw for him at the Marshall. He always goes to a student’s home to give lessons; it is less inconvenient for the student when he runs late.
Fabiano Caruana, the top-ranked player in the country under the age of eleven, was happy to see Pandolfini when we reached his parents’ Park Slope apartment. Fabiano folded up his scooter and plopped himself down at a chess table in the front room. He was small for his years—he was eight—and had curly brown hair and bright, alert eyes. Pandolfini was eager to show Fabiano some new rook and pawn endings, but Fabiano insisted on playing a game. Pandolfini chose a cramped formation called the French Defense, a favorite of Botvinnik’s. Fabiano, a tenacious attacker, couldn’t sit still while he played. He stood up or slung both legs up on the table, and stared off into space while Pandolfini was thinking. When Pandolfini moved, he responded instantly with a move of his own.
“The little machine is eating me alive,” Pandolfini said, “but that pawn move can’t be right. It weakens the dark squares.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Fabiano said.
“Of course it does,” Pandolfini said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Fabiano repeated.
“Fabiano’s greatest strength,” Pandolfini told me later, after Fabiano had lost the game, “is that he has the courage of his convictions. He is stubborn and sticks to his ideas, come hell or high water. That serves him well in tournament play—you need to believe in yourself—but it makes him harder to teach. When he has a misguided idea, it’s not easy to talk him out of it.”
CHESS IS A PURSUIT, LIKE MUSIC OR MATHEMATICS, IN WHICH NATURAL TALENT is essential but must be cultivated. No one is born knowing how to checkmate a lone king with just a bishop and a knight, or when the exchange can be sacrificed advantageously in the Dragon. These are the kinds of skills Pandolfini teaches, customizing problems so that they stretch the student’s ability and imagination but aren’t so difficult that the kid gives up in frustration. He also reviews the student’s recent tournament games, asking him why he made each move and what he would have done had his opponents responded with different, stronger moves. Pandolfini is out to correct errors in thinking, positions in which the student is convinced that he has pulled off a clever maneuver but has succeeded only because both he and his opponent missed the refutation.
In New York, it’s easy to find a financially strapped chess master willing to give chess lessons, but finding one who likes to teach very young children—and has Pandolfini’s talent for it—is another matter. Most parents are relieved that Pandolfini is not bent on creating a chess champion. “Before Bruce, we had the type-A spouse of a grandmaster,” the mother of one of his third-grade students told me. “Then the brooding grandmaster himself. They were obsessed with the idea of making a prodigy.”
Pandolfini’s second lesson of the day was nearby, in Windsor Terrace, at the home of Giancarlo Roma. A fourth-grader, Giancarlo was more respectful of Pandolfini than Fabiano was, though his playing style was no less aggressive. They did a “postmortem”—chess lingo for postgame analysis—of a game that Giancarlo had recently played on the Internet. He had used the Traxler Counterattack in the Two Knights Defense, a highly tactical variation in which both sides were walking a fine line between victory and defeat. “You can get away with taking his pawns,” Pandolfini said. “Pig out if you wish. There’s nothing wrong with
a little piggetry.”
“When Bruce comes, we put out wine and cheese and then leave the two of them alone,” Giancarlo’s father, Tom, told me. “But I once sat at the top of the stairs and listened to the whole lesson. I find extreme beauty in the way Bruce describes chess moves, in the way he creates a story out of each game. I’m a photographer, and I teach photography, and I’ve always told my students that chess is one of the highest art forms. In our culture, which promotes a short attention span and instant gratification, there’s something delightfully old-fashioned about chess. There’s also something frighteningly narcotic about it.” Giancarlo’s father hopes that chess will always have a place in his son’s life—“maybe he’ll be the best chess-playing shortstop on the Yankees”—but he doesn’t want chess to overwhelm his life. “There’s always that danger,” he told me. “Fischer cheated himself by taking the game too seriously. He robbed himself of his own humanity by despising the very existence of his opponents. There was a period in my own life, when I worked on Wall Street before I became a photographer, when I drank a lot and stayed up late playing through the chess games of old masters. I read Nabokov’s chess novel then, and it certainly was a cautionary tale.”
ONE AFTERNOON IN 2001, PANDOLFINI CANCELED HIS CHESS LESSONS AND joined me for a screening of The Luzhin Defense. In a Hollywood ending to an otherwise dark and arty movie, Luzhin’s fiancée, who does not play chess, discovers his notes on how to dispose of Turati and takes his place at the board to make the stunning and decisive rook move. On the scale of cinematic incredulity, it is as if Rocky’s girlfriend hopped into the ring and delivered the knockout blow.